By Tom Breihan
on July 28, 2011 at 5:05 p.m. EDT

Eleanor Friedberger, the female half of the Fiery Furnaces, released her first solo album Last Summerearlier this year. And this fall, she'll tour North America, playing shows with Deerhunter, the Kills, and Wild Flag. We've got her dates below.

By Tom Breihan
on November 12, 2010 at 6:05 p.m. EST

We will not be starved for new music from Matthew Friedberger any time soon. The Fiery Furnaces' male half is planning to release a series of eight vinyl-only albums via Thrill Jockey in 2011, in a subscription series that he's calling Solos, as Friedbergertells Entertainment Weekly. The series will start with six albums, each featuring Friedberger singing and playing a single instrument: piano, guitar, organ, double bass, drums, harp. Those albums will arrive every two months, from January to November, with two bonus albums coming at the end of the series. That's the artwork for the series up there.

Later this month, the Brooklyn prog-pop duo will embark on an American tour. When that's done, they'll head off to France, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey-- all before playing Pavement's ATP festival in England. We've got the full itinerary below.

By Tom Breihan
on December 3, 2009 at 12:00 p.m. EST

Hopefully, the Fiery Furnaces' Matthew Friedberger has gotten his goofy "feud" with Radiohead (and Beck) out of his system by now and the Fiery Furnaces can get back to the business of being one of the most entertainingly idiosyncratic bands going. Their new music video certainly suggests as much.

"Daily Show" writer Scott Jacobson directed the clip for the I'm Going Away track "Even in the Rain", which doubles as the story of the making of the 1969 countercultural biker odyssey Easy Rider. Eleanor Friedberger plays Peter Fonda and Matthew plays Dennis Hopper, which turns out to be better casting than you'd expect. (Matthew is really funny!)

People like "Daily Show" correspondent John Oliver, Superchunk drummer/radio comedian Jon Wurster, and Sebadoh's Jason Loewenstein (who also plays with the Furnaces) make appearances.

Check it out below or over at Pitchfork.tv. Also, the Furnaces have shows coming up on both sides of the Atlantic. We've got all those dates below.

The singer-songwriter just put up a couple new MySpace blog posts related to the kerfuffle, including one titled "IMAGINARY RESPONSE!" which he describes as a "virtual response" to the Beck song. He goes on in a very meta, very hypothetical, very screwy, and sorta condescending way, writing circles around himself for a few paragraphs. He makes Kanye's all-caps blog apologies seem downright comprehensible.

If you dare, read the posts here and here on MySpace. We copied and pasted them below, too:

By Ryan Dombal
on November 19, 2009 at 10:15 a.m. EST

Photo by Drew Brown

We're not exactly sure how much a recent Radiohead diss by the Fiery Furnaces' Matthew Friedberger inspired Beck to release a 10-minute-plus tribute to experimental composer Harry Partch, but we're glad this thing exists. And it's up on Beck's site now. (Read about the convoluted quasi-beef here.)

Friedberger tried to cover his fuck up with a statement that said: "Matt has not heard the Radiohead song about Harry Patch, but if he did, he is sure he wouldn't like it. No doubt Radiohead and their fans can ignore his opinion of this matter and continue with their triumphant artistic interventions. Matt would have much preferred to insult Beck but he is too afraid of Scientologists."

Now, Beck seems to actually be responding. He's putting up a new song called "Harry Partch" on Beck.com later today. According to a post on the site, the track "employs Partch's 43 tone scale, which expands conventional tonality into a broader variation of frequencies and resonances." It isn't clear yet if the song is directly related to Friedberger's remarks, or just one hell of a coincidence.